Death of a Salesman (1985), TV movie - Schlöndorff's great adaptation of Arthur Miller's masterpiece

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Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman and John Malkovich as his son Biff on a DVD cover for Volker Schlöndorff's Death of a Salesman

QUICK REVIEW:

Farm-worker Biff returns home to visit his disappointed father, who is struggling with the bills and his sanity.

This Death of a Salesman adaptation is a CBS TV movie directed by great German filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum/Die Blechtrommel (1979)), based on playwright Arthur Miller's (A View from the Bridge (1955)) own teleplay adaptation of his legendary 1949 play of the same name.
The film presents great acting in every part: Particularly Dustin Hoffman (Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)), John Malkovich (Mulholland Falls  (1996)) and Charles Durning (Tootsie (1982)) as Willy's neighbor are eminent. Schlöndorff has staged the play with expansive, affecting colors and sets that enhance the super-reality of the stream-of-consciousness-based story. Miller's masterful script stands out as clear as lightning here as the almost unbearably intensive male tragedy that it is.
SPOILER Loman's death is, regrettably, inelegantly handled.
Still, Schlöndorff's film is a generally outstanding adaptation of one of the irrefutably best plays of all time.

Watch a student-made trailer for the film here, (an official trailer is not in Youtube currently)

Cost: 3 mil. $
Box office: Unknown 
= Unknown
[Death of a Salesman had its TV debut June 24 and runs 136 minutes. Hoffman was interested in mounting a movie adaptation with Miller's co-operation as writer-producer, and Schlöndorff was hired based on his expressionist ideas. The film came to be as the conclusion of the 1984 revival of the play on Broadway with most of the actors playing their characters again in the film. The film was made with the big screen in mind and shot in 20 days. Miller had been unhappy with the two previous adaptations of the play, but he was proud of this version. The film was shown theatrically in foreign countries and at several film festivals. You can read more of the making of the film in a New York Times article from the time of its making here. Hoffman won a Golden Globe for his acting in the film, and it also won 3 Emmys. Death of a Salesman is fresh at 100 % with an 8.4 critical average on Rotten Tomatoes, and 7,004 IMDb users have given it a 7.3 average rating.]

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